Free Republic

What is the trap, by the way. I’m always confused about the steps. It goes:

1. We strike a false peace bargain or otherwise disengage
2. Iran, some coalition of Islamic states, or all of Islam together, somehow, strikes at Israel
3. ?
4. The US is doomed

I’m not in the habit of thinking of Israel and our national security being one, so help me out. How does Israel being overrun, ceasing to exist, directly threaten us? Not that I want that to happen. They are our allies, and I wish the best for them. But their borders aren’t ours, and I can’t make out how them being their or not makes a difference to the integrity of our country.

None of it makes sense unless I think of it religiously, which I won’t do, or imperialistically. There’s the rub. That’s what stands behind neoconservatism, a way of looking at the world as the Romans or Victorian Brits did, which is “conservative” by virtue of being less leftist than one world socialist universal brotherhood.

I simply can’t think like that. I know it glgas something to do with oil prices, the West’s foothold in the region—because for some reason we need a “presence” everywhere—and the fact that countries dominated by Islam are somehow outside the modern consensus. This is bad, the entire globe not quite thinking the same things, everywhere and all at once. It is supposedly what causes terrorism: our not controlling their minds.

Couldn’t be our very presence pudding them off; couldn’t be us occupying parts of their region, fighting various wars, moving their borders like pieces on a chessboard. Wh in their right mind would complain about that? Except us, endlessly, if they tried one one-hundredth of the intervention over here which we do routinely everywhere in the world.

You may argue the alternative was unthinkable. Certainly Churchill didn’t think about it, stupidly singleminded as he was. “Their finest hour” is nowadays presented as a stand against conquest, as if a negotiated peace was tantamount to surrender. And not just surrender, but surrender into slavery. What utter nonsense. Prove to me Germany wanted to conquer Western Europe.

Hitler talked about “living room” in the East and had set up the Bolsheviks as beside the Jews his arch enemies since “Mein Kampf.” Nothing of the sort existed for Britain and France, though it was official Nazi policy to redress the grievances of Versailles, and assume its rightful place as preeminent European power. I see no proof they wanted to conquer the world, as most seem to assume.

Germany had a claim on Czechoslovakian land according to the Versailles principles of ethic self-determination in which Western powers pretended to believe. They also had a claim on Danzig, though not the “Polish corridor” seperating it from Prussia. Invading Poland was an act of baked aggression, but France and Britain were hardly justified in going after Germany but not Russia, which came in from the other side simultaneously. Except that geography made direct intervention there impossible.

There are no factors mitigating Germany’s invasion of Russia and other Eastern European countries, nor for its declaration if war on the US. But to backtrack from them to the war against France and Britain, and to pretend it was all of a piece within Germany’s secret plot to monopolize the globe is irresponsible. France and Britain went to war at a time of their own choosing, officially to bailout an ally—or half-bailout, since the side sinking into the Soviet empire was on its own—though really in a quixotic attempt to preserve forever the balance of power as it stood in 1918.

Churchill said Chamberlain traded honor for peace. Of course, his sense of honor isn’t everyone’s. Honor to him was more than Victorian; it was Britannia ruling the waves and the continent licking its boots. But you don’t get that merely by stamping your feet, throwing a fit, and pouting for it. He knew at the time the US would have to jump in, as it did in 1917. But he could pass that off as not losing honor, even though Britannia would no longer be autonomous over its own foreign policy, because of the fiction that is “the English speaking world” and the Anglo-American Alliance. Not to say no such thing existed. More than anything else our foreign policy in the 20th century was guided by believing ours and Britain’s, ir later free Europe’s, destinies were united.

That’s not to mention they’d have to lick Stalin’s boots, which Churchill seems not to have considered. I find it the height of irony that immediately following settlement of WWII we frantically tried to reestablish our main enemies, Germany and Japan, as bullworks against our erstwhile allies, the commies. What was the point of getting them out of the way in the first place, if we’d need them immediately afterwards again? Was it honorable to trade Hitler for Stalin. I’m at a loss as to what was gained. Unless you believe in the myth that not going to war in ‘39 was tantamount to selling yourself into slavery. That’s the only way it makes sense. It isn’t very hard to pretend the “their finest hour” speech isn’t rank nonsense. It’s so poetic, so Tennysonian.

Chamberlain was anything but poetic. Maybe his way was suicide, but maybe it would’ve worked. We can’t say Churchill’s worked, since we know it failed. And there isn’t any way I can figure it working, though there are correctable mistakes made obvious by hindsight. Chamberlain’s way might not have ended in loss of autonomy, loss of empire, massive debt, socialism, complicity in evil, etc. At least we can say that about it.

Churchill love is fetishistic among conservatives, for whatever reason, but Chamberlain wad right. What was it Churchill was interested in? Preserving the Balance of Power, maintaining the empire, and keeping his country’s economy from collapsing and going full socialist. What did WWII gain him? Nothing. He lost on all three points: the European continent—and the world, for that matter—were to be dominated by the US and USSR, Britain’s foreign policy would be dictated by the US, the empire was lost, a mountain of debt was incurred, and the Beveridge Report Welfare State began.

Not only was the balance of power shifted in Russia’s favor, but the Brits helped push it over to their side. They weren’t merely culpable for standingly iidly by; they were complicity in commie evil. They materially helped it.

Forget about peace for tge region. Let’s leave and have our seperate peace.

I graduated college just as internet work was becoming mandatory. I always used a computer to type papers but didn’t want to pay for internet access, so I would do what I had to here and there. It got to a point where they’d assign weekly online quizes, make you fetch supplemental materials online, have you email papers to them, etc. One more semester and I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten away with it.

That’s what you have to bear in mind while reading this article. No doubt the kids are being assigned online articles to read, are forced to collaborate online, take online quizzes, etc. I’d be all for it if it broke the back of the corrupt textbook industry, but almost certainly it doesn’t. There isn’t any reason why teachers couldn’t have a bipartite system, whereby students can choose the internet or paper. But they’re stupid, lazy, and operate under misconceptions as to the future (as if kids won’t be able to land IT jobs because they didn’t copy and paste from wikipedia when they were twelve).

I remember the Clinton’s always talking about the “digital divide.” What is these people’s obsession with equality? Guess what, having computers will make zero measurable difference in the lives of recipients. They’d probably be better off mot affording any technology more advanced than a printing press book.

Well, guns are chemical weapons, like bombs, in that they ignite powder to propel bullets. Bombs are “arms,” technically speaking, though I doubt they’re legal.

“What do you ascribe that to?”

Overzealous government, if it in fact exists. Seems to me people grow more sheepish as time goes by.

“This is why you fanatically push the legalization of drugs on FR...your biggest fear in life is that you will eventually have to pass a drugs test to collect welfare. Your only desperate hope to maintain your pathetic lifestyle is to get drugs legalized before that happens”

I can think of few actions less likely to result in legislative change than posting on FR. If he was really so desperate he’d be marching on Washington, or anything besides arguing against brick walls in a small, faraway place on the internet. Or he could forget about welfare and deal drugs; your preferred policies have made that racket lucrative for the bold, the quick, and the lucky.

I remember that. It stood out to me, since I’m from MN, where your routine is unchanged by snowfall even were we to get 12 inches at rush hour. But no one treated it like it was crazy, so I didn’t think much of it. Now that I reconsider, I’d guess it was less about controlling the populace than not wanting to pay for plow rental.

It also helps heroin dealers, incidentally. So “Big Pharma,” Big Cartel, Big Government, Afghani farmers, and probably terrorists all win.

Here’s a solution: turn the black market white. Legalize it.

“it ‘poses an increased potential for certain types of abuse’”

Increased compared to what? You know what else poses a potential for abuse? Whiskey. And you don’t even need a doctor to play along for that.

Shut up, government. I’ll abuse myself if I damn well want to.

I said at its root “pagan” means folksy. Whatever Plato was, that’s not it. He was a citydweller, an academic, and had aristocratic airs. Peasants don’t go around dreaming up their own philosophical systems, obviously. But you must admit people use the term in more ways than that. In addition to “pre-defined gods...worshipped in established ways” it also has the connotation of pre-Judeo-Christian-Islamic. Surely you’ve noticed that, even if you consider it ill usage.

I couldn’t say either way whether the mystical threes in Platonic philosophy influenced the Trinity of Christianity. If they did, it would be only in a vague and I direct way. As in, some larger Mediterranean idea motivated both Plato and the later Christians, like how a flood motif can be found both in the Bible and Gilgamesh. I’d be careful here, too. Because I happen to know some of the early Christian philosophers were Platonists, in a manner of speaking, prior to conversion. St. Augustine was a disciple of Plotinus, who in turn was a Platonist.

There are other similarities between Platonic philosophy and Christianity, though they’re all very imprecise. He came close, as I waif, to draping the Good in the clothes of divinity. The Doctrine of the Forms has the same sort of lesser reality way Christians look at created reality. Not that Christian reality isn’t real, but Jesus’ kingdom not of this earth is more real, if that’s the way to put it, than this earth. Tge metaphor of light is big both in Plato and the Bible, and with similar import. I believe he posits an afterlife. He definity conceives of a soul. Learning things, for instance, is like remembering them from before you were incarnate. Which sounds maybe like Hinduism, but it’s the idea of something uniquely you transcending matter which I’m thinking of.

I don’t want to quibble about Aristotle’s importance. Clearly he’s one of the most influential thinkers in human history. But I would add that he owes a great deal to Plato, probably the greater part of his teachings are Platonic rather than sui generis. I say “Platonic” knowing, of course, that he was influenced in turn by countless forerunners, for instance Socrates, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, etc., and for all we know he stole it all from Socrates.

I should also add that the Alexandrian conduit may not be the primary route through which Greek philosophy ended up in Christianity. The Romans conquered Judea, and they had stolen all the best Greek thoughts after conquering them, too. Jesus, as we all know, was burn and died in the imperium. And the church received its biggest boost when an emperor adopted ot as an official religion.

Then again, one of the most influential early Christian philosophers Augustine, was from North Africa. I haven’t researched him enough to know whether he grew up around the remnants of Alexandrian conquest. Rome conquered North Africa, too, however. So it would stand to reason he got his Greekiness from Roman Greekery.

I assume the term “pagan” was there used to mean pre-Abrahamic, meaning before Judaism, Christianty, or Islam. Though that usually implies polytheism, all it etymologically means is “folksy” and “rustic.” Peasant religion, in other words. There was such a thing as monotheism prior to Jews. See Amun-Ra in ancient Egypt.

You are correct to emphasize the similarity between Platonic philosophy and Christian theology. Many have commented on the God-like quality of “the Good.” Some theorize one of the reasons Socrates was killed for impiety and corruption of the youth is because he taught monotheism.

“[Aristotle] was certainly more pertinent in that day and age as Alexander’s legacy was still fresh in the annals of history”

What? Alexander didn’t leave any intellectual legacy, except insofar as his victories were a conduit through which Greek culture flowed to the surrounding area. Aristotle was one of those Greeks, but only one.

If you think of Alexander spreading Aristotle in particular because of the fact that Aristotle was employed at the Macedonian court and tutored Alexander, there isn’t any discernable Aristotelian influence in the Alexander of the annals. He’s pure conquest.

Posse comitatus.

By the way, this may form part of the plan for graduated martial law implementation, but we’ve been pretty far down that road already. The Civil War and reconstruction went all the way. The National Guard has been nationalized who knows how many times for use in what are ostensibly state issues. Most famously to enforce desegregation, though that was an edict from the federal courts. Also for piddling crap like the Rodney King riots.

The DEA, FBI, ATF, etc. are technically paramilitary outfits, but I don’t see any good reason to think of them as anything but military.

Women’s “rules” were about ensnaring men into committed relationships. Equivalent rules for men would be rules for getting sex, and it would consist of a single command, reading: “pester her until she gives in.”

That’s true, but they’re not even consistent enough to stay emotionally inconsistent. Particular feelings they’ll hold onto forever, never forgive you for causing, and throw them in your face whenever the opportunity presents itself. They’re terrorists, is what I’m saying.

What about women? Can they read our minds, or is it all BS projection?

Also, how do we know what emotions the faces were expressing in the study? Did researches ask the faces in question what they were feeling at the time? How do we know they weren’t lying? Maybe the information men supposedly missed wasn’t there and, per usual, women were given credit for made-up feelings.

By the way, our inability to read facial clues, or women’s supposed superiority in “emotional intelligence,” are not to be confused with women being more emotional, nor their emotions being deeper and profounder, or whatever the cliches are. Men feel things, but we hide them from the world. Because they’re secret, and could get us killed.

Hard for me to swallow the Martin Luther argument. Firstly, it predates him. Secondly, there are other denominations. Poland, which is supposed to be so dang racist, was Catholic, wasn’t it? Germans didn’t get around to exiling them (into death) until 400 or so years after Luther, whereas Catholic Spain chucked them out during the inquisition. Which I guess could be blamed on Luther in a backwards way, since he is thought of as sparking the heresies against which the inquisition was reacting.

You’re warping the meaning of “nanny,” there. The other poster may be insisting on his way, but it would be as if a nanny were forcing a parent to let their kid eat ice cream all day. A recognizable sort if nanny would be forestalling the kid from spoiling his appetite. The way you put it is a little like lefties who rail against the “tyranny of the marketplace,” preferring the freedom of state regulation.

Not everyone who got tax cuts under Bush the Younger and Obama before he changed his mind was rich, either. But what does that have to do with political exploitation of class resentment?

“The people who were determined to get drunk would have been drunkards with out prohibition as well”

Maybe, but also it could turn regular drinkers into drunks, for the obvious reason that if you’re gonna break the law you wanna make it worth your while. Aside from inexperience and the general idiocy of youth, this is a big reason why high school drinking parties tend to come with puke and alchohol poisoning, whereas people who can drink whenever they want don’t attach soecial importance to any random might of drinking.

Also, the very fact of illegality is a draw for some. The greater the taboo the greater the desire, as they say. Which isn’t universally true, but applies here. Outlawing certain things almost guarantees you’re going to make a fad of them.

Anyway, alchohol consumption did go up for certain classes. That is a fact. Prohibition was not effective across the board.

“Great harm comes to countries and cultures when intoxicants are legalized and the legal and societal proscriptions against their use are loosened.”

As a conservative you ought to rely more upon prescription than proscription, especially for so-called crimes which run entirely counter to the natural law understanding of crime. I see no reason why “societal” standards of conduct have to follow legal proscriptions. Unless you live in a corrupt civilization such as our own, where gubmint intrudes itself into every nook and cranny of our lives.

Might I suggest that if it is so that legalization of drugs leads to their abuse that this is the fault of the previous prohibition, rather than its removal? I see no good reason to assume otherwise. It would be as if we suddenly turned away from socialism—the impossible dream—and left everyone on their own two economic feet. Proletariat wouldn’t know what to do, and society’d grind to a halt as we’d storm the capital and demand they save us from ourselves. For no one’s been raised to be anything beyond minimally self-reliant for more than a century, and we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. Would this be freedom’s fault? I’d rather blame gubmint for replacing the ethic that built this country with gross subservience.

That being said, there remains the giant flaw in your case for the War on Some Drugs. Let’s say sudden legalization of marijuana would bring chaos. Are you saying alchohol consumption is relatively orderly? Is it even possible to think that? I guess so, since most everyone drinks and not everyone wrecks their lives and the lives of others. But that’s a crooked way to look at it. Because by any measure alchohol causes much, much more damage than any other mind altering substance. This is so despite the much vaunted and sacred cultural/historical habits grown over the generations you imagine render it harmless. Or harmless enough to be legal.

Other drugs were legal or mostly so in the past, though certainly they’re more potent, and various other changes, foremost the replacement of personal responsibility with what can be termed the Freudian Ethic, have made them potentially more dangerous. You can always argue legal marijuana would cause more trouble than booze. But is the scourge of alchohol, however relatively benign you account it, truly a-okay? You’re fine with all the addiction, all the accidents, all the disease, all the lives ruined, and so on? Why? Where is the line? What does it take to require proscription, and what is it about weed which booze lacks?

The answer is always something along the lines of it’s been there for thousands of years, and we’ve evolved customs to deal with it. But those customs don’t work all that well, so far as I can tell. There seem to be a panopoly of evils, and precisely the same sort of evils associated with illegal drugs, resulting from alchohol abuse. The real answer is that we’re used to alchohol. It’s been around not long enough for us to use it wisely, but long enough for us to treat its adverse effects as a natural part of life. Marijuana et. al. haven’t been grandfathered in thusly, and as such still seem like something only dirty hippies and other burnouts use.

That’s the beauty of democracy. Non-politically-favored minorities can go suck an egg. Highs for me and not for thee.

Prohibition may have shrunk consumption generally, but it went up for certain portions of the population. Is that all it was supposed to do, by the way? Was the expenditure worth the result? Were all the negative side effects: loss of liberty, perversion of justice, rise in crimes concomitant to black market trafficking, funding of empires of organized crime, political corruption, diminution of respect for government, increase of dangerous thrill drinking, increase in potency and lack of safety concerns for what booze was consumed, etc., unimportant? Seems to me a rather low bar for prohibition’s success to hang on that one measure.

If it worked so well, why was it repealed, anyway?

“It can be argued that Prohibition resulted in the great upward mobility that happened in the 50s and onward.”

No it can’t, except maybe by maniacs. In the first place you’d have to ignore the fact that the Great Depression started during prohibition, then you’d have to ignore the fact that there was a bigger gap between the end of prohibition and the postwar boom than between the start of prohibition and the Great Depression. The argument can t be that the generation which grew up under prohibition learner a good lesson about sobriety which showed itself in the 50s, though not the 30s or most if the 40s. But that is nonsense, because that’s a whole generation away.

Is it that prohibition children passed their sober experience onto the next generation? No, because that’s too close to the baby boom generation, which was the most irresponsible to date.

All this ignores, also, the incredible booms of the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th, which was proportionally bigger and historically more important than the postwar boom, plus the Jazz Age boom, which happened during prohibition, yes, but hardly arguable to have been caused by it.

Of course, it will be used to stir up class resentment in a push for yet more healthcare socialism. Imagine, richies paying pet doctors to cater to their every whim, treating them for gout and designer drug addiction while malnourished children die waiting for the care that were the more fortunate in it with the rest of us would be subsidized.

Interesting tidbit, though the mainstream healthcare industry in slightly more socialized countries like Britain are a sewer, ancillary services like plastic surgery and chiropractics see boom times. The obvious reason being.g gubmint control makes things crappy.

I should say, also, that even if he was a true blue believer in some faded Reaganite version of the free market, none of that mattered in the supposed 11th hour. He was being honest, not misspeaking, because they’re all New Dealers when the cards are shown. No politician anywhere, not even a Ron Paul, is going to ignore generations of precedent.

I, on the contrary, think he meant it exactly as he put it. There certainly isn’t much practical evidence of him being a free marketeer, except maybe tax cuts—which could be mere vote buying—and the ill fated quest to partially privatize social security—which could have been to have more money for spending Pubs prefer.

Is it not a common sense truth that prohibiting what people won’t stop using creates crime, too? Or does that crime not matter? Not to mention the accomoanying growth of and loss of respect for gubmint. Who cares about innercity thugs having shootouts in residential neighborhoods? I’d much rather bust someone for getting high on something that isn’t alchohol./s

I’d much rather deal with real crimes caused by drug abuse than the fake “crime” of drug abuse and crime caused by the black market created by prohibition. Especially because even with prohibition anyone who wants to can abus, drugs. There is a downside, as I’ve mentioned, considering we’ve turned away from personal responsibility and cushion people from the consequences of their actions. But advocating prohibition as a fix is wrong. Foremost because it’s unjust; also because it doesn’t work.

Your argument reminds me of the Bloombergian argument for sugary drink and salt prohibition. Now that we have partially socialized healthcare, it becomes the community’s responsibility to regulate people’s health. Hence sugar and salt intake fall under the “police powers” of gubmint. The real solution, as you and I know, is for fatties to pay for themselves. Otherwise socialism will keep causing problems that will inevitably require gubmint oversight of every damn aspect of our lives.

I must conclude by stressing how much worse a problem is alchohol, and how absolutely silly is your ignoring it.

Prohibitionists ate rather uniquely upfront about their “la-la-la, I can’t hear you” finger in the ear routine. Internet debates hardly ever change anyone’s mind, but most of the time people at least pretend to be listening to eachother. I enjoy honesty about beliefs being beyond rational discussion.

You have to live amongst drunks, too. How are they any different?

You play the Janis Joplin card. Want me to list everyone who’s died because of alchohol? Is there enough space on the internet?

You can argue that it was proper and worth it, but that has no bearing on the absurdity of the quote. Because if gubmint caused the problem in the first place, then the market wasn’t free. If gubmint must step in further to correct it, then it’s not as if they cancel eachother out. What you’re left with is doubly unfree, if anything.

I want to say that what Bush II meant was that they had to abandon free market principles to save the market. But that’s not true, either. Unless we all succumb to a zombie disease, or some other catastrophe, there’ll be a market. We had to abandon free market principles to save the market as it was. Meaning, to keep So-and-so, Inc. in business to prevent the populace and the global market from freaking out and collapsing the house of cards. Which is “too big to fail” in a nutshell.

A case can be made for that, but it has nothing to do with the free market.

“Walking the streets without crime because of drugs is my business too.”

Can you possibly be ignorant of the fact that their being illegal creates crime? Real crime, too, not the “crime” of using drugs, which can only be considered criminal with a perverted sense of justice. I imagine the argument runs in your head like so: drugs are bad, and if people can abuse drugs with impunity they won’t be able to work and will turn to lives of crime.

Well, we have that anyway, seeming as how all prohibition does is push it into the black marks. Plus, we have lives of crime subsidized by black market trade. Plus again, we have all the loss of freedom to go along with gubmint’s increasingly desperate mission to do the impossible.

I can see you assuming that drug abuse would be worse in the absense of the Drug War, even subtracting the concomitant trafficking crimes. But I’d be happy to trade, for then we’d be punishing actual crimes. You know, malum in se crimes, not the “crime” of self-abuse. That could always be handled by nature, as I said, if it’s so bad.

“Your big mistake is completely ignoring the scourge of drugs on society”

First of all, check out post 5, my original post, in which I talk about alchohol as a blight on civilization. Prohibitionists never have any answer for that, because it is unanswerable. All they can do is pretend “hard” drugs are worse. But that doesn’t apply to marijuana.

Anyway, in the post to which you responded maybe I wasn’t explicit enough. Drug abuse has adverse consequences, but those very consequences, if but we let them, can set off self-correcting mechanisms in the abusers. We can bring the state in to punish or deter you, or we can leave people free to fail at life. The latter happens to be immeasurably more efficient, except that prevailing political, psychiatric, and other mindsets rebel at the thought of true responsibility.

I was rereading William Graham Sumner’s “What the Social Classes Owe Eachother,” which is like a good knock to the head. It wad written long ago, but even then the angels of the state saw tot to coddle abusers. His prescription was to do away with drunk tanks because they subsidize drunkenness. Leave winos in the ditch, and there won’t be as many winos. Nature punishes us for what wrongs we commit against ourselves, believe it. We need gubmint to stop us from hurting eachother, not for how we hurt number one.

“Which is what”

Probably, “They drank booze in the Bible, whereas when I think of marijuana all that comes to mind is dropouts eating cheetos.” You can say alchohol has been a part of our civilization for millenia, since it has, and according to that people assume we know how to deal with it by now. We don’t, or at least not any better than other drugs. I often wonder how weed is so different that we can’t apply the way we treat booze to it.

But so long as weed remains illegal, you can imagine things being infinitely worse under it than under alchohol freedom. Presumably this would involve drivers repeatedly losing control of their cars, husbands beating wives, unemployment and general physical decline, etc. You know, all the things alchohol doesn’t cause thanks to our culture/s

Sounds kinda like what Bush the Younger said, along the lines of we had to abandon free market principles to save the free market. He almost certainly knows nothing about the free market, despite having an MBA and having been in the actual business world, briefly. And if he did he’d probably lie about it anyway. The Do Something instinct is too powerful to resist, even for people nominally on the capitalism side. I think we’ve been officially in a state of emergency for 80 years. No joke.

Your formulation sounds also like an infamous quote attributed to some military authority about Vietnam. We had to destroy a village to save it, or something. It almost certainly was garbled or poorly put, if not invented out of thin air. Because it’s too perfect a description of strategic absurdity to be genuine. A guy like Bush the Younger, though, I can imagine meaning it honestly.

What is your “cultural perspective”? I imagine a group of men sitting in a cloud of cigar smoke, drunkly rambling about how irresponsible are those damn, longhaired hippies, before each drives home or into a tree.

“since the election results that seems a bit like an alchoholic writing to the president of Anheuser-Biscuit begging him to ‘stop me before I drink again!’”

The composition of Congress remains almost as it was in 2010, when the electorate, I believe, reacted negatively to the underhanded and probably illegal push for Obamacare. Not that it isn’t the people’s own fault, and certainly they deserve all abuse gubmint can heap upon them. But it still sits wrong in me to pretend it was a runaway victory for the Dems. And not because I’m a partisan of the Stupid Party; I figure it doesn’t matter one way or another which party’s in control. It seemed to matter for a second while Obamacare was in doubt over Ted Kennedy’s vacancy. But somehow that made no difference.

“How much freedom does a drug addict who is a slave to drugs enjoy?”

You’re confusing freedoms, here. One is the gubmints business, the other is between man and God or nature or himself, or whatever. One is your business, the other not. Very many choices are becoming the collective’s business, the more gubmint intrudes on our lives. Food, for instance, I assume will be just as regulatable as now is marijuana, considering we’re all responsible for eachother’s healthcare bills. And the logic is tight: if you cost the people more money than the next guy because you’re fat, you deserve to be punished by the state. That is, if the law is not going to be held back by oldfashioned concern for personal freedom, individual autonomy, and justice as traditionally understood.

There’s another way, however. Fatties could pay more for the same insurance. Weed smokers could be responsible for their own actions. We could let the inherent absence of freedom in addiction to which you allude make smoking weed, if ot really is so bad, correct itself, rather than the state further restricting the freedom that’s not there anyway.

The beauty of socialism: the more problems it causes the more socialism is required to fix them. Think how many industries nationalizing insurance coverage can wreck, which then will have to be nationalized to save. I’m absolutely certain there are plans in the works to unionize the theater workforce, than nationalize the union, like they’re trying to do with childcare.

I don’t know if licker and smokes are harder to come by than other drugs. In the first place there’s a much better chance your parents are stocked with cigarettes and booze than weed. Also, older friends and siblings are easily pressed into service to buy you what you’ll be able to buy for yourself in a few years. Maybe it comes down to the fact that dealers tend to deal in substances which are illegal for adults, too, because there’s no market for the stuff you can get on your own without much hassle.

I remember when I was in high school, which wasn’t too long ago, anyone who wanted to could smoke and most parties were booze parties. Weed smokers were a more particular bunch. The only ones who used crystal and other harder drugs were burnouts. I do recall hearing that nowadays heroin is back in a big way because it’s cheaper than the various prescription opiates kids steal from their parents. I could see something similar happening with cigarettes or booze.

What I never got about the gateway argument is why it excludes smoking and drinking, which if I recall childhood accurately came before marijuana “experimentation.” Obviously, the answer is we tried banning booze and failed, and smokers are too big a lobby, even though they toy the runnaround with those idiotic lawsuits and stupid restrictions based on the nonexistent threat of “secondhand smoke.” Weed smokers, contrariwise, are still a small enough minority to beat upon.

How does the gateway argument stretch past childhood, while we’re at it? Why can’t it be like booze, whereby the law pretends we’re minors for three years after the age of majority? Or it could be like cigarettes, with which we deal ever so more rationally. Why can’t 70 year olds, for instance, light up? Are we afraid marijuana would doom their 80s to a haze of meth abuse?

“The US has declined markedly since marijuana use has become widespread.”

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. This was also a period of time during which people were shielded from the consequences of their actions like never before. Plus a million different things, none of which have anything in particular to do with weed. I don’t know how you know weed caused the decline in importance of family, church, community, etc., instead of the other way around.

Even if weed is to blame, it is unjust to pretend growing, dealing, and smoking it are crimes. Whoever told you freedom didn’t have a price? A marked decline is worth it, considering how much worse is prohibition.

This from a guy who’s probably surrounded by armed people 90% of his day.

Your post is absolute BS so long as alchohol remains legal. It’s BS for other reasons, too, but especially this one, considering how much worse of a blight on our civilization is booze compared to weed.